Yes, charging large numbers of electric trucks requires lots of power—as the anti-EV community often reminds us, an electrified truck depot might use as much power as a sports stadium. (And? As Charged’s home city of St Petersburg continues its decade-long fight over the building of a new stadium, I have yet to hear any of the project’s many opponents cite power consumption as an issue.)
While modern electrical grids are more than capable of providing the power needed to electrify trucking, it is true that simply plugging an EV fleet depot into the wall, so to speak, is not the best option. As Michael Barnard and Rish Ghatikar explain in a recent CleanTechnica article (part of a series of articles on electric trucking), the “superpower” that unlocks the value of electric truck charging is a microgrid, which combines EV chargers with local energy generation and storage. The microgrid model offers opportunities for both fuel sellers and vehicle operators to explore flexible pricing options for fun and profit.
Diesel fuel is a commoditized product. Margins on fuel sales are low, and competition keeps prices aligned in local markets. For truckers, on-site refueling facilities make sense only in certain scenarios (remote locations or regions where heavy traffic makes refueling a hassle). Electrons offer more flexibility. “The cost-benefit balance changes substantially when electrified trucking and charging infrastructure is considered,” Barnard tells us.
Messrs. Barnard and Ghatikar present a hypothetical microgrid setup for a large heavy-duty truck stop. It features 8 MWh of buffering battery storage, 5.2 MW of rooftop and parking canopy solar panels, 6 megawatt-scale truck chargers and perhaps 20 DC fast chargers for light-duty EVs, along with a grid connection capable of providing 2 MW of power to the battery banks.
This configuration could deliver about 80 MWh of electricity per day, enough to charge around 200 light-duty vehicles and 200 heavy-duty trucks. About 60% of the energy would come from the solar panels, which have zero marginal cost of electricity and very little maintenance cost. The batteries can be charged from the grid during periods of low demand and/or low levels of solar generation (nights or cloudy days), giving the operator significant flexibility in retail pricing of electricity. “When 60% of the fuel a truck stop provides every day is essentially free, the flexibility for profit maximization is high,” Barnard writes.
One key factor in pricing, however, is that electricity must be sold at a lower cost per mile than diesel fuel. As Barnard explains, pushing competing non-electrified truck stops out of business is part of the point of the strategy.
For a logistics depot, the microgrid needs to be designed a little differently. Whereas at a truck stop most of the demand will be for fast charging, at a depot most of the vehicles will be charging overnight, so it makes sense to provide fewer megawatt-scale chargers and more Level 3 and Level 2 chargers. Also, more buffering battery storage will be required. In Mr. Barnard’s model microgrid-equipped depot, the savings are even greater than for the truck stop—about 66% of the energy would be provided at zero marginal cost.
The electrification of trucking won’t happen overnight, but increasingly fleets will have to electrify or perish—one European freight forwarder told Mr. Barnard that he expects battery-electric truck operators to realize savings of between 10 and 20 percent.
Source: CleanTechnica
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